A Study of the Religious Images in The Pangcah Girl

• Main Authors: Chen,Yun-Ching, 陳韻清
• Other Authors: Chiang, Shu-chen
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/y2b4vv

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 客家文化學院客家社會與文化學程 === 107 === ABSTRACT Hakka writer Gan Yaoming has been well-known for his favorite topic of folk legends and his style of magic realism. However, his second novel The Pangcah Girl, published in 2015, six years after his first one, The Ghost Slayer, drops the magic tone in his representation of the once-flourishing logging industry in Hualien and local ecology in the 1970s. One thing that has to impress the readers is the abundant quantity of religious gods and stories in the realist novel. Why did Gan Yaoming do so? The previous research on Gan Yaoming mostly focuses on the author’s style of nativist writing. This thesis, however, intends to use the religious historian Mircea Eliade's concept of "hierophany" to sort out the large number of religious phenomena of The Bangcha Girl, with an attempt to explore the deeper meaning hiding behind the text. The so-called "hierophany" is "the utter other", which functions to make people feel the power of mysteries with reverence. This thesis analyzes the concept of hierophany from various sanctified perspectives of space, time, nature, and human beings. The result shows that two religious themes-- death and love—has permeated the whole novel. Facing death is the ultimate question in life. Only when we know how to die, do we know how to live. Love is the power to keep us moving forward when life is difficult. As the male protagonist Pajilu says "The earth is a church, a temple”, nature in the novel has the most embracing power, protecting all kinds of minority groups—the old, the sick, the handicapped, and the poor. The timeline of the book was set in late 1970s, a time when Taiwan was experiencing difficult diplomacy, but enjoying an economic boom. Despite the fact that the political situation may seem gloomy, the prosperous society has provided the conditions for people of various ethnicities to develop harmonious relationships.